Last Sunday I had the pleasure of a visit at home from Jaman's European VP, Faisal Galaria along with his lovely Mum :) Faisal was over from SF, visiting his family for Eid-ul-Fitr, so we figured it was a great chance to finally meet.

Faisal grew up just a few miles from me, we're from similar backgrounds and even though we only became aware of each other recently, it seems we've had criss-crossing careers with involvement in regulatory work, VoIP and now emerging technologies; kinda like a geek Persuaders.

I'm a big fan of Jaman's indie content...yes, even the Bollywood stuff, so when Faisal intriguingly mentioned in passing that Jaman was now available as a native application on Apple TV I had to investigate further. It turns out the Apple TV is basically running full OS X, so a little hackery with USB drives and SSH means that Jaman can be installed and run as an addition to Apple TV's existing user interface...neat! This is quite a precedent and should signal to Apple that there's a great platform waiting to be borne from one of their most overlooked products.

I'm now wondering how much of OS X can be run from an Apple TV...enough to hack together a Mac nano?

The clouds parted, the sun shone and our third OpenCoffee Leeds event was another great success with our largest turnout - we counted thirty-one people in the Loftart gallery, even though we had with 28 definites out of 45 registered at Upcoming. I'm really pleased that we're seeing new people amongst the crowd as well as regulars each month...also we had two *girls* this month! Seriously, women are badly under-represented at OpenCoffee and I now for sure there are some very smart tech women in the region (I'm talking to you Katz, Deb and Liz!)

**A special mention has to go to Justin's guys at Loftart - they make by far the best fresh croissants and danish pastries in town! **

Surprisingly, no one cracked open their laptops this time around - perhaps a good sign that people are indeed connecting with one another...though as Ian noted, maybe the consequence of a higher proportion of suits and the be-chino'd...please, we wanna see more DEMOS!

With the larger attendance, I didn't manage to meet everyone, but did bump into some interesting people...

I came across Reinhold Behringer's work at Leeds Met while googling for photos of Old Broadcasting House a few weeks ago and figured he'd be a fascinating individual to meet. Reinhold is Professor Of Creative Technology at the university's Innovation North faculty, his work focuses on computer vision, augmented reality, wearable computing and robotic vehicles...an incredible porfolio of research and someone whom I'm sure the others were fascinated to meet.

We had the founders of Freeserve and PlusNet, Ajaz Ahmed and Lee Strafford in the same room, respectively responsible for two of the British dotcom industry's largest exits and notable success stories. Both from the North...I wonder if the next British dotcom hit will also emerge from this region...? Ajaz spoke briefly about one his ventures, Browzar and was curious about what I'm now up to...I owe him, so I'll explain later :)

Earlier this week, I test drove Manchester-based Westhawk's Phone from HERE technology for O'Reilly's ETel blog. It's a cute softphone applet that can run directly from within your browser. Westhawk's Georgia Brown hopped over the Pennines to tell us more about their plans and the state of tech in Manchester.

Richard Garside, of Garsonix Design, left everyone with some cute origami business cards - could this be the post-Moo badge for geeks? You can read about Richard's projects, at um Richard's Projects - including his impressions of OpenCoffee and all about his cards :)

bmedi@'s CEO Steve Ding and Chairman Nick Burton were also around this month. The company is a regional network of new media companies that's created a unique tendering model that aggregates the capabilities of local firms to bid for new contracts. {full disclosure: I'm a non-executive director of bmedi@}

I was really looking forward to meeting Tim Waters for a whole bunch of reasons - I'm a bit of a mapping geek and Tim has some fascinating expertise in locative and geospatial media. Tim's also behind Leeds' OpenStreetMap project and is hoping to put together a weekend OpenStreetMap-camp in mid-September...I'm hoping we can swing the use of Leeds Met's Old Broadcaasting House as a venue for him :) Serendipitously, it turns out Tim also knows a good friend of mine, another mapping guru and fellow-FooRich Gibson. Rich is currently contracting for a short time in the UK and I hoped to get him up to Leeds for a few days, but sadly he couldn't make it...we coulda had our first bona-fide American!

I finally got the chance to meet Andy Mitchell, co-founder of meecard - we missed each other at the first OpenCoffee Leeds and also at BarCamp Sheffield! Andy's a great guy, with an idea which could be particularly well timed, defragmenting the various personal and social identities we're creating across the web. Andy and I met again later in the afternoon to talk about a bunch of stuff that we could do together to help tech across the region and share our experiences working on digital ID projects :)

It was nice to see some old Orange colleagues, Jedi-Developer Mark Sailes, ultra-smart Kevin Whitworth and Graeme Moss, creator of GromBlog, a sqeamishly hilarious Boing Boing-like blog; I really wish Grom would 'go big' with GromBlog, He'd be a great blog-preneur.

I spoke briefly with Colin Glass, a partner at accountant's firm Winburn Glass Norfolk. Colin described how WGN uses its accountancy practice as a base to develop startups, assisting in fund-raising, business planning and finding exit routes; WGN's been involved in a couple AIM and OFEX. I can't claim to understand much of this - I think of stuff and I make it! - but Colin's expertise seems like it'd be quite useful to tech startups and as such he's a valuable guy to know.

We need to drag Sam from Blognation, Saul and O'ReillyGMT's Craig over for the next event - show them close up that London's not the only buzzin' tech hub in the UK :)

Despite this - the feedback we're getting from people is that they're really loving the format and the community, so we'll make a few tweaks as we go along and of course we welcome everyone's ideas and suggestions on how we can make things better :)

24th May: OSS Northern Way is holding its first discussion, bringing together entrepreneurs, regional development agencies and universities to promote the use of open source software across the Northern Way.

26-27th May: This weekend will see the first BarCamp Sheffield event. Seventy people sounds like an amazing turnout for the first event, particularly securing sponsorship from Cisco, BT, Tiscali and others. I love that they have a steel welder in their logo!

31st May & 12th June: North West 'grassroots geekery' community GeekUp will be holding a pair of meetups in Liverpool and Manchester over the next few weeks.

14-15th June: Next month Katz Kiely's Just-B will be holding the 2007 edition of B.TWEEN at Bradford's National Media Museum.

So all this is telling me to get my ass in gear on Carbon's Northern Blog Project, OpenCoffee Leeds and potentially a BarCamp event for Leeds too...watch this space :)

In the words of my erstwhile CTO from Wanadoo and Orange - 'Rob. He's like my Dad!'...indeed, Rob Wilmot & Ajaz Ahmed were my first Freeserve parents...I found this dramatic image of them from a brochure on 'New Yorkshire' :)

In recent days, I've been reflecting a lot on the various mentors I've looked up to in the first part of my career...Roz, Silvia, Rob, Ajaz, Sid & Norman...and wondered if they thought I was doing OK?

As I'm starting to advise a bunch of startups and develop my own ventures with Carbon, I find myself channeling them...conversations, mannerisms, random phrases. I owe them all.